Edited by Russ Kick
Disinformation What started out as someone saying there should be an alternative to 60 Minutes has become the most reliable news source on the internet. For the past five years disinfo.com has consistently brought some of the most dangerous and controversial stories America could ever hope to find out about. AA doesn’t work. Pearl Harbor was a scam. It’s not your parents fault and humans have already been cloned are but a few this book puts to print. We’re not sure if it’s because the people at Disinformation are so tenacious or mainstream media is so watered down they make anyone with so much as half a ball seem like subversive ninjas. All we know is that next to salon.com the only way you are going to find out what’s really going on is to open up this 400 page compilation of their best stuff and say “holy fuck.” —Darren Beans DANCE OF DAYS
Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins
Soft Skull Press “They call it the salad days. I call it a lie. A goddamned lie.”
—Ian Mackaye OK it’s great. It has everything you could ever want to know about the early DC punk and hardcore scene. The pictures are perfect. The research is flawless and it was assembled by the people that were there from the beginning. Perhaps the first book to come out on the subject that newsmakers like Guy Picciotto actually approve of. Just don’t slip into that rut where you think the DC scene was so much better than your hometown’s. The beauty of hardcore was that that everyone realized we don’t need a punk Hollywood anymore. Things like Maximumrocknroll’s scene reports showed us Calgary and Wisconsin were just as great as New York and London. The truth is, if Salt Lake City had a bunch of rich senators kids with their own darkrooms and record labels they’d have a great documentation like this to sum up their scene too. —Christi Bradnox Ron English
POPAGANDA The Art & Subversion of Ron English
Shortwave Some tend to pooh-pooh English as another tacky, LA-style, Juxtapoz artist that graduated from drawing skulls on his school binder to giving the Mona Lisa a believable mohawk. He’s much more than that. Take his revolutionary art projects for example. His anti-Joe Camel billboard campaign single handedly led to Camel cigarettes scrapping the entire multi-million dollar campaign. A glitch in their business plan that not only seriously hurt Camel’s popularity but woke up the American public to the way cigarette companies and other corporations surreptitiously target kids. And his art isn’t as limited as people think. English’s hilarious tribute to the sketches of of loco musician Daniel Johnston are impossible to criticize and stray 1000% from his freaky skull stuff. Popaganda is perfect for the critics that don’t think he’s high art enough because it shows that with a range this drastic and full of context you just can’t shit on the guy. —Kevin Brakes Cola Madness
Gary Panter
Funny Garbage Gary Panter has that same elusive aesthetic that skater artists like Chris Johanson have. They are simultaneously low and high art. Panter’s latest book is was actually drawn 18 years ago. It’s a 200 page comic starring that Jimbo guy and was conceived primarily for Japanese audiences. After spending five sit downs in the bathroom to finish it you can’t not see why this genius is accredited with making the careers of everyone from Matt Groening to Pee Wee Herman. —Kristopher Patt Lady Like #45
Angela Gardner
JoAnn Roberts I think I figured out men who dress in drag. They’re not fags and they’re not crazy. They are just middle-aged men that are sick of being ugly. Sure they look hilariously bad in their white pumps and outdated red dresses but if you really get down to the science of it and are totally asexually objective, they do look better. They only look about 5% better, but when you are a 4/10 using female tricks like make-up and tights to boost yourself up to a 4.5 is sometimes your only recourse. —Jen Sanduers G-Fan #49
DaiKaiJu Enterprises The only thing cooler than watching Godzilla in action is watching Godzilla fans watch Godzilla in action. They care. This magazine dedicated to Japan’s worst enemy has film reviews and drawings and, blah blah blah, but the letters page has to be seen to be believed: “I’m curious as to whether anyone has examined the effects of Godzilla cells on a human being. It’s an interesting premise and it might be a way to bring a Gargantua into the current continuity.” —Chip Randall Classic Gamer Magazine Vol1 #4
Self-Published While Asians and fat guys with beards are working around the clock to bring us more complicated video game technology some people want them to stop. Classic Gamer Magazine talks passionately about the importance of having a “joystick nation.” They are furious about talk of a Tron sequel and they play Ms. Pac–Man so well they can make her female ejaculate. This particular issue features the slightly less geeks-only topic of classic game toys and has mouth watering features on Atari clothes, Donkey Kong toys and miniature versions of Galaxian. An important edition of the magazine because these collector’s items are the magical missing link that brings hipsters into the world of the nerds that they so revere. —Rudy Thompsons Big Daddy #5
Self Published The worst thing about High Fidelity was that the movie took place in The States instead of Britain. The English are into black music in a way that doesn’t translate over here. Back in the 60s and 70s you had mods getting into bottle fights over northern soul and people getting trampled at Liverpool’s Otis Redding concerts. They die for it and this fanatical love of everything remotely black is still going strong with hip hop culture, jungle, roots rock and rare groove. Unfortunately Fat Lace is once a year, Fat Boss is over, and Big Smoke is just rap now, so the only place you’re going to get a well rounded feel of the crate digging UK blackophile experience is Big Daddy. Best check it fast before these broke-ass white boys are the next to die out. —Ran Xerox SUPERFLUX
Issue #1, June 2001 This beautcake of a zine, put together by some chief somewhere around Boston takes “low-end” production to new levels. I mean, it’s one piece of paper, photocopied and folded in half — too small to even be called a pamphlet, or even a leaflet for that matter. But as the author says, “this is meant to be examined for content not form,” and well-written, typo-free content it has. Quality insights on employment, consumerism, the internet and America’s obsession with convenience sum this thing up. It’s punk, and political, in it’s own angry drunk kind of way and he gives props to Turbonegro, Thirstin Howl III, Bobby Conn and Pabst Blue Ribbon (Union Made) which warrants an easy endorsement from us. —Paki Wolf
Contact: revplo@yahoo.com FREE AMERICAN
April Issue
Self Published The April Issue answers the question: “What if Goebels was editor of The Nation?” As a salve for the financially wounded, we are told “the Jews” have an Illuminati-esqe grip over 99% of the world and are steering Wall Street off a cliff. In Barnes and Noble I digested this 10-page breakdown of semetic svengalism. It’s explained a New York Jew named Schimm orchestrated the Russian Revolution, with Stalin and Lenin acting as puppet figures. It then goes on to explain that “all communism in the world is directly financed and controlled by Jews.” To veil their takeover of capitalist U.S.A., the myth of an Italian Mafia was “invented by Hollywood, to hide the fact that most organized crime is run by Jews.” Free American magazine is like Jack Chick for the M.B.A. crowd. —Obi Wan Shinobi Hermenaut
No. 16/ Winter 2000
Self Published Discovering that there have been 16 issues of Hermenaut that have gone unnoticed by my smartest, savviest friends and myself led to the realization that either (a) we’re reading all of the wrong things lately, or (b) America’s intelligent underbelly is much bigger than we ever imagined. Any magazine where you can find philosophical ruminations on Adorno alongside ads for Ninja Tune and Touch and Go records (our high modernism?) is bound to be historically precious. It’s the kind of blend of criticism and contemporary culture that sent one of its writers headfirst into the porn industry (read “Porno for Philos”). But I don’t believe it was any commitment to Adornian aesthetics that propelled this budding hermenaut to peddle porn. As a Ph.D. student myself there are two factors I can cite that might make skin flicks an attractive career option: 1) an outlet for the massive libido you get when you try to make a lot of difficult, arcane material relevant (someone should study this phenomenon because the Academy is full of horny, smart people fucking each other); 2) a solution to the humiliating poverty you agree to endure in the process of making a lot of difficult, arcane material relevant. This is a journal/mag worth the subscription. I wish they would send one to VICE for free. —Eddy Moretti Lie With Me
Tamara Faith Berger
Gutter Press This book is gripping. Written by former VICE columnist Nursex, these fantastic tales of balls-on fucking, promiscuity, gang-bangs, blow-jobs and everything in-between are linked in a stream-of-consciousness style that requires masturbation every twenty pages. But this is not your run-of-the-mill wank fodder, switching from female to male to female perspective in three chapters, the impeccably written segments exorcise the dark intersection between sex and love and come out with an answer -- need. —Suroosh Alvi BIZARRO COMICS #1
Jenette Kahn
DC Comics Ever since DC got bought by Time Warner they seem to be trying to be less and less DC. Sure this book still has superheroes but with a cover by Matt Groening and contributors like: Ariel Bordeaux, Dave Cooper, Sam Henderson, James Kochalka, Jessica Abel, and Tom Hart, it’s more like a reference guide/ who’s who of underground cartoonists than something you’d actually read. —Johnny Woodring